I was originally introduce to reddit by my dad about 12 years ago. He has been using it for about 16 years now.

It seemed when all the talk about the blackout started, he was completely in agreement with me. We both thought the blackout was a good idea, were cracking jokes about how we were gunna find something to do with all our free time.

I started looking around and found the buzz about lemmy and kbin. Started trying to figure out how federated sites work. It felt like information overload, but I didn’t have anything else to entertain me so I made an account and started finding groups, and now I am enjoying my time browsing here a lot.

My dad had a different experience. He continued to check reddit through the first day of the blackout and by the second he was browsing it as often as ever. He seemed to have stopped caring about all the subs that were gone and protesting and just wanted some stuff to read and look at. When I tried to joke with him about it he seemed apathetic to it all.

I tried to get him to browse lemmy, to see how he likes it. He wasn’t interested. I tried sending him links to specific posts, and he didn’t really care or look at them. We used to share reddit posts with each other and talk about them, and I was kinda surprised he didn’t care to do that at all if it wasn’t on reddit.

Eventually I sat down with him in his office and got him to make an account on lemmy.world, but he browsed for less than a minute then just switched back to reddit. I just awkwardly left the room after that.

Today I shared another lemmy post with him, just still in the habit of sharing interesting stuff I see. When I asked him later if he looked at it, he told me to stop bugging him about this lemmy stuff.

It feels pretty bad to lose this routine that is an excuse to regularly talk to my dad. I feel like if I want it back I’m going to have to use reddit, because he seems to have a pretty negative perspective of lemmy.

Idk what it is I want from posting this. Maybe I want advice, maybe I want people to talk to because I feel kinda sad now, maybe I want to give people on here perspective on why some people aren’t leaving reddit. Thanks for reading if you got this far.

  • Phil@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    It sucks man. I’ve had similar experiences with my dad. There comes a point in life where you realize that not sharing a close passion or hobby with the people you love is OK. The love from the community is just as good. Yes it’s great if you can bond over the same things but at the end of the day it’s totally OK to NOT share a passion too.

    And who knows, if Reddit gets worse he might switch or get more interested - this is just the beginning. For me, I just learned not to push the topic if my dad wasn’t interested. You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.

    I’d just do me own thing and if he ever comes to me later with questions I’m happy to chat and show him the ropes.

    For example he wasn’t too interested in the Right to Repair talk, but I got him a Framework Laptop and he had to replace the Keyboard and found it so easy. I think he gets it now. But for 20+ years he was hardcore ThinkPad.

    Give it time. If your dad never switches that’s OK too. Just share memes and content and don’t worry too much about the platform.